For over fifty years, medical device companies (along with pharmaceutical and biotechnology firms) have been marketing and selling their products in a conventional Value-Added Reseller (VAR) model. Physicians who become users of a given product act as value-added resellers to patients or third-party payers such as insurance companies and HMOs.
Unfortunately, the slow pace of recruiting significant numbers of physicians often throttles product sales because the only patients who can be sold the product are those who have contact with the limited number of physicians who use/endorse the product. This leaves the vast majority of potential patients untapped. This problem is particularly problematic for start-up or emerging phase medical device firms with a limited sales and marketing staff and/or budget to reach the geographically dispersed physician population.
Another area within the medical community sensitive to similar constraints lies in the recruitment and tracking of patients in a clinical trials setting. Here, the problem is at least three-fold. First, especially in the case of therapeutic drugs, a sufficiently large patient population needs to be identified and recruited with a specific disease state or condition appropriate for the drug under evaluation. Secondly, the recruited patient population needs to be tracked through the clinical treatment protocol, where in many cases multiple procedures are required over extended periods of time. And lastly, in many cases the outcomes evaluation of the therapeutic drug or procedure may require extended tracking of the patient population after treatment has been completed to quantify long-term benefits (e.g., survival rates) and uncover unexpected side-effects.
Given the above scenario, there is a need for a method of finding and pre-screening (qualifying) potential patients either for referral to an appropriate physician or clinical trials investigator, with the follow-on goal of tracking their progress through the various stages of appointment, treatment, and outcomes verification.